Print
Word
PDF
|
| Name: _________________________ | Period: ___________________ |
This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.
Short Answer Questions
1. What repetition technique is used in the story's opening paragraph?
2. How has the narrator and Gin's relationship changed by the end of the summer?
3. What does Gin tell the narrator she is afraid of when they are lying on the beach together?
4. What is the first priority of the ambulance attendant when he arrives?
5. Which detail of the narrator's description of their kisses indicates the passage of time?
Short Essay Questions
1. What plot events--one immediate and one later--are foreshadowed by the narrator's description of "the bodies of lovers...visible in lightning flashes, scattered like the fallen on a battlefield" (234)?
2. Explain the relationship of the story's title to the Amichai poem excerpt used as an epigraph.
3. How is the From Here to Eternity love scene evoked ironically when the narrator and Gin are on the beach?
4. What is the inclusion of details about the House of Dong intended to convey?
5. When the narrator and Gin are on the beach, what does the narrator imagine the people along the Gold Coast doing, and what thematic ideas does his description convey?
6. What is the rhetorical purpose of including the narrator's loss of the condom right before the drowned woman's body is discovered?
7. What do the first paragraph's details about the father's car convey about the family's social class?
8. Where are some of the places listed in the poem's opening paragraph, and how do they convey the couple's youth?
9. What is foreshadowed by the page 233 description of their "lover's lane"?
10. In what sense does the narrator mean that, after the night on Oak Street Beach, the dead woman was always "with" him and Gin?
Essay Topics
Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:
Essay Topic 1
Write an essay that makes and defends a claim about the purpose of the shifting moods Dybek creates in "We Didn't." Be sure to support your assertions with evidence from the text.
Essay Topic 2
Write an essay that makes and defends a claim about the narrator's depiction of the female body. How does his language reveal his attitudes about women and their bodies? How does this attitude toward women's bodies characterize the narrator? Use quoted textual evidence to support your ideas.
Essay Topic 3
In interviews, Dybek has mentioned that "We Didn't" began as a poem. He believes that it still occupies a prose space that is very close to the border of becoming poetry. Write an essay that analyzes the lyric nature of "We Didn't." How is it created, and what purpose does it serve? Support your assertions with evidence from the text.
|
This section contains 1,231 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) |
|
